François Ozon's adaptation of The Stranger, while visually stunning, reveals the limitations of cinema in depicting the complex inner states of consciousness that Camus masterfully crafted in his text.
Claude Chabrol, the celebrated co-founder of the French New Wave, stated, 'Because men are living, and women are surviving. Cinema is about surviving.' This profound insight influenced Petzold's approach to storytelling.
Dead Lover's heroine is odorous by trade, a lovelorn gravedigger of indeterminate age and origin. Glowicki's accent, roaming between Canada, Canvey Island and Canberra, becomes part of the fun—she's driven to extremes after her verse-spouting poet sweetheart perishes in a shipwreck. Part-Burke and Hare, part-Victor Frankenstein, she salvages what she can of the corpse.
Separating the art from the artist can be easier debated than done. In 1967, Roland Barthes infamously argued in his essay "The Death of the Author" that a writer's biography should be irrelevant to the meaning or value of their work. In 1983, Nora Ephron asserted the opposite in her novel, : "Everything is copy." Today's pop culture has tended to agree with Ephron's take: Confession fuels the biggest songs; celebrity memoirs dominate best-seller lists.
As I devoted more time and energy to the Filmmaker newsletter throughout the last decade-plus, I'd often find myself in some form of dialogue with producer, strategist and consultant Brian Newman. His invaluable Sub-genre newsletter arrives on Thursdays (now, biweekly), mine on Fridays, and, like me, he'll often comment on the production and distribution challenges facing independent filmmakers in an increasingly commercialized, politically cautious and algorithmically-driven media landscape.
In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I'd expected-without necessarily hoping for-a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film contemporaries, cut an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed,
